Post Content

Zits, 3/17/05

O faithful Comics Curmudgeon readers: the future Mrs. C. and I request your assistance in arbitrating our disagreement about the meaning of this strip. Upon reading it, I identified with the core conflict immediately. I used to be a teenage boy myself (shameful, I know, but undeniably true), and I remember having this precise argument with my mother on numerous occasions. She really didn’t understand why she couldn’t come and go from my room like she did every other room in her house, and I couldn’t quite verbalize why it bothered me so much. I think a lot of being a teenager is about setting boundaries — sometimes overly strong boundaries — about differentiating yourself from your parents, about creating a literal and figurative space for yourself and your personality despite the fact that you’re still dependent on your parents for so many concrete and intangible things. It’s a tension that Zits depicts off pretty well, here and elsewhere, and it’s one of the reasons that, despite a dearth of laugh-out-loud-moments, I like it quite a bit.

My fiancée, meanwhile, thinks this strip is entirely about masturbation. What do you think?

(By the way, I’ve mentioned my betrothed quite a bit here lately, and some might think that she’s been pressuring me to do so. I promise to you that I would never compromise my artistic integrity in any way, even for the love of my life. The plain fact is that I work at home, and sometimes I go 48 or 72 hours without leaving the house, so she’s the only person I talk to other than the voices in my head. Once I start quoting them, you’ll know there’s trouble.)

Post Content

Get Fuzzy, 3/16/05

Was Get Fuzzy in a slump the first few weeks it was in the Sun, or is it just the kind of strip where you have to get into the rhythm of it every day to really appreciate it? Either way, I recant my earlier doubt about the strip and am once again a believer.

This may seem a little counterintuitive, given that Satchel and Bucky are a sweet and emotionally vulnerable moron and a self-absorbed and cruel moron, respectively, but one of the reasons I like Get Fuzzy is because I’m a cat and dog lover. The strip actually keeps a lot closer to domestic animals personalities than most comics. Cats have a reputation for mysterious intelligence that any cat owner can tell you is entirely undeserved. They are great at moving and acting as if they know exactly what they’re doing at all times, even when what they’re doing is something incredibly stupid. (We watched our cat take a full minute to gather herself up, judge the distance between herself on the floor and the tabletop, and then launch herself directly into a lava lamp, which almost landed on top of her as they both plummeted to the ground.) Dogs don’t really exude that sort of self-confidence, but they do make rash decisions based on little to no information. I think that’s perfectly encapsulated in this exchange here. Also, I like the phrase “Been there, ate that.”

Incidentally, in my research for this post (yes, I do too do research), I read an online interview with Darby Conley from a few years ago in which he was asked if there was anything his syndicate wouldn’t let him get away with. He said wasn’t allowed to deal with “religion or poo.” Between this and last month’s shizzle outside the litter bizzle, I think at least one of those two have rules have gone out the window.

Post Content

Apartment 3-G, 3/15/05

After years and years (OK, I guess just years) of reading Apartment 3-G, I can now finally say that I’ve seen something in its panels recognizable as being a potential part of the New York I’ve visited. This combination laundromat-restaurant is exactly the kind of twee, high-concept wackiness I expect from those people up there. Down here in Baltimore, we just like leave the house and pay someone to cook for us, but apparently in New York, you need to have a theme to pack ’em in. Of course, in real life this joint would probably just be called “Laundromat” or something similarly minimalist for extra confusion — “Laughs & Laundry” strikes me as, you know, trying too hard. Kids today! With their laundry bars and their oxygen bars and their cereal bars and their flim-flam and their hoo-hah and their pants hanging down so you can see their underwear! It makes me sick.

The stab at modernity is sort of undermined by the young woman in the background of panel one, who appears to be on spring break from Vassar, circa 1962. Or is she a retro-hipster, fresh from Williamsburg? Only Frank Bolle and Lisa Trusiani know for sure!